from the New York Daily News June 20, 1997:

Now Music -- After Dark

BLUEGRASS COTTONS TO A NEW YORK YANKEE
by Mary Talbot

"A talented southern boy's easy presentation of traditional and classic acoustic and electric swing tunes," is how a rhapsodic reviewer described Jon Sholle's album "Catfish for Supper." Which is perfectly accurate, except that Sholle is a born-and-bred New Yorker and even recorded his latest, "Out of the Frying Pan" (Rounder), a superb homage to some of the great chestnuts of bluegrass, in Westchester County, far,far, from the Great Smoky Mountains. 

It's not the first time that Sholle -- who plays Sunday night as part of a semi-regular gig at Citron 47, an unpretentious restaurant-cum-music-venue on W. 47th -- has been taken for an artifact of the South. Since the early 1960s, when Sholle began forging a reputation as a teenage guitar prodigy in Greenwich Village coffee houses, he has matched practitioners of the high lonesome at their
own game. 

"In the late '60s, I was in a band called the New York Ramblers. We used to go to a lot of fiddlers' conventions and swept all the prizes," recalls Sholle. "We were a bunch of long-haired Jewish guys from up North, but the old-timers still gave us all their loving cups and ribbons." 

In the succeeding decades, Sholle mastered the mandolin and Dobro (which he plays on the new record), as well as musical idioms ranging around jazz, Texas swing and blues--all of which pepper his bluegrass album. He has toured with David Grisman and accompanied Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Bette Midler and Sonny Stitt. And he continues to pull inspiration from artists as diverse as Louis Armstrong, T.Bone Walker and Oscar Aleman, the late Argentine guitarist who played in Josephine Baker's Parisian band. 

Sholle's gigs are appropriately informal, hospitable affairs, and lately he's partnered with fiddler Kenny Kosek and whoever happens to drop by for sets of bluegrass, swing and jazz. "Everything I do is based on American music," says Sholle, who likens his passion for bluegrass to a virus. "If your system is susceptible, it gets you." 

Even if you're a Jewish guy from New York City.